


My Problem Is You

by Mireille



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-08-01
Updated: 2001-08-01
Packaged: 2019-03-23 03:11:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13778427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mireille/pseuds/Mireille
Summary: Just one time, he wished Carlye would actually go away when she left him.





	My Problem Is You

# My Problem Is You

## by [Mireille](https://web.archive.org/web/20071125111015/mailto:archivesNOSPAM@afternoonsandcoffeespoons.org)  
  
---  
  
* * *  
  
Just one time, he wished Carlye would actually go away when she left him. Not that she'd left any physical traces of herself in the camp, at all, not so much as a dropped hairpin to show she'd ever been there.

And she hadn't been there that long, really, so it wasn't even as though anyone ever mentioned her. Or thought about her, most likely; they were all used to people coming and going.

But she was still there, every time he closed his eyes, every time he let himself be still enough to really think--which wasn't that often, because the last thing he wanted to do these days was think about anything beyond where the next drink or poker game or nurse was going to come from. She was always going to be there in his mind, but she was never going to come back.

Carlye was gone, because Carlye didn't want to come second to his work, and no matter how very much he loved her--and he  _did_ , damn it, even if she didn't really seem to believe him--she couldn't believe that it would ever be enough for her. That he'd ever really let her in.

He certainly hadn't ever let anyone  _else_  in. Not the nurses who passed through the 4077th; no matter how pretty and charming they were, no matter how soft and warm and willing in his arms, he didn't have it in his heart to love them, because none of them was Carlye. And the best that he could say for himself was that he didn't pretend to love them, as a rule, so at least he was being honest. Most of the time.

With them, but not with himself, not if Carlye was right about him. Because he could say, over and over again, that the reason he was going to die a bachelor--though hopefully surrounded by pretty nurses at the old-folks' home--was that there'd never be a woman who meant as much to him as Carlye did. And he could say that if Carlye would just come back to him, would marry him, he'd have a chance at the kind of marriage that BJ and Peggy had, or the colonel and Mrs. Potter.

But if Carlye was right about him, and no one knew him better, really, then the problem wasn't her, like he'd been believing for all these years.

It was him, and it always would be. And he might have been able to get rid of Carlye, maybe, eventually, but he couldn't ever get rid of Hawkeye.  
  
**Author's Note:**

> [me on tumblr](https://mireille719.tumblr.com)


End file.
